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Printing pleasing profit: The crafting of capital selves and sales in early modern, English drama

PRINTING PLEASING PROFIT: THE CRAFTING OF CAPITAL SELVES AND SALES IN EARLY MODERN, ENGLISH DRAMA
by
Brooke Allan Carlson
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2010
Copyright 2010 Brooke Allan Carlson

This project brings together the histories of subjectivity, early modern drama and economics. Moving across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I chart a significant shift in subjectivity and social relations that connects the individual, art, and the market. Indeed, as the commercial market takes off, poets begin writing to please (and edify) for profit (financial gain). That is to say, the struggle between the Roman and Greek poetics is complicated by the change in “profit;” the “old profit” means education and the “new profit,” even as it demands pleasure for success, also entails financial gain. Recent criticism focusing on economics emphasizes the materiality of the stage. Whereas the mind is often secondary to the material in such critiques, the development of the mind occurs alongside the development of the body. In fact, early modern poets get to the mind through the body, and get to the body of the viewer or reader through the mind. The fact that audience members see bodies acting out other bodies and persons on stage furthers the distinction between bodies and selves. At the time, the very idea of the self or even the soul as separate from the body was troubling. On the stage, then, and in early modern play texts, I argue the expanding early modern subject is made visible as a body in flux.; I begin my first chapter with the early modern theatre before the advent of the commercial market. I study plays performed within schools and the inns of court – Gammer Gurton’s Needle (1562-3), Gorboduc (1562), and Roister Doister (1562) which are highly invested in “old profit,” or profit in the sense of education. Nevertheless, the bawdy bodily pleasure involved as a means of diversion in these texts highlights the division between classes, genders, and even social concepts like love and marriage.; In my second chapter, I argue the commercial theater proffers a space and play of "new profit" that, while still grounded in instruction, is ambiguous in its increase of pleasure and subsequent criticism of itself and its audience. I argue that in Shakespeare’s plays we can read through material objects and their constructed emotional power to arrive at the individual and the staging of the self as disavowal and discourse. Conceptually, I map my own discourse through Shakespeare’s plays The Merchant of Venice (1596-7), As You Like It (1598-1600), and Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1600) by first situating their physical settings and the recent critical reception. I then explore: the commodification of characters and cultural concepts through coins; shapeshifting, as represented with the purse; the recurrent imagery of circumcision and the cutting away of men. In exchange for the coin passed to gain entry, the playing company provides the viewer the experience of pleasure, of feeling. Market logic impacts early modern culture in corporeal ways as an emerging discourse that rejects marriage solely along class lines. The residual discourse of male-male love is being rejected and replaced with a romantic love ground in instability and uncertainty. And finally, the emerging discourse of shape-shifting bodies provides solutions to the problems of marriage against class lines, at the same time that it re-affirms class division.; On the other hand, in my third chapter, on Jonson’s Volpone (1606), Epicene (1609), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614), instability creates room for pain, penetration, movement and liberation. The emerging discourse is the moving body, a body that changes from one thing to another, in the name of profit and pleasure. For Jonson, the space of drama is the social and interactive experience of the stage, and the private, imaginary space of the play text. Time is a concept Jonson wields as an exchange; in return for admission, Jonson asks not only that his audience stay and enjoy his work, but also that they re-experience the play above and beyond its “two short hours.” The plays and the people playing on stage, as well as the audience on occasion, are thus commodified. Moreover, Jonson crafts subjects in the experience of the stage, even as he critiques them. The animosity and excoriation we feel in Jonson's plays stems from Jonson's ambivalence around the "new profit.” All of Jonson’s work, particularly through the emerging discourse, demonstrates a newfound reliance upon individuals as self-governing subjects seeking financial gain. Jonson’s use of meta-narration reflects his own art, subjectivity, and the market as the struggle that persists to this day.; Parliament closed the theater in 1642, but the reopening of the commercial theater and the return of the monarchy after the civil war, brought about important changes. At the end of the early modern poetic market – from William Davenant’s The Man’s the Master: A Comedy (1669) to Margaret Cavendish’s closet drama The Convent of Pleasure (1668) and Milton’s closet drama Samson Agonistes (1671) – the problem of the body becomes a subjective and internalized process of self discovery. Re-imagined off-stage and through the process of reading, early modern subjects envision bodies in action. Restoration theater, with its privileging of class in the audience, coupled with the emphasis upon new profit and pleasure on stage, attempts to fix the body as demonstrative of class and worth, even as the new drama relies entirely upon adaptation of foreign work and translation of earlier English plays.; Advancing the new economic criticism by employing my own sort of cultural materialism grounded in the critical work of Raymond Williams, I flesh out the dominant, emerging, and residual discourses developing amidst an early modern culture in transition. Moving away from economic analysis invested in objectification, I argue that gender as instability allows early modern subjects to negotiate class issues. Across the period, the body itself is the site wherein cultural anxiety is performed. I draw on early modern literary criticism to demonstrate the contemporary engagement with these issues of market culture, material, and the changing early modern mind. The generic manipulations at the end of the seventeenth century bring us to the long-eighteenth century and eventually on to the appearance of the novel, a form particularly apt for commodification. What makes the English early modern stage so important to us today, above and beyond its function as the background of the Renaissance and humanist movements, is its relevance to our continued struggle with art and capitalism, our unceasing complication of human beings as both subjects and consumers.

PRINTING PLEASING PROFIT: THE CRAFTING OF CAPITAL SELVES AND SALES IN EARLY MODERN, ENGLISH DRAMA
by
Brooke Allan Carlson
________________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)
August 2010
Copyright 2010 Brooke Allan Carlson